"There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind." - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"Each heart knows its own bitterness, and no one can share its joy." - Proverbs 14.

Sometimes, I wonder about myself. I wonder about how knowable I am, how knowable each of us is. I once had a conversation with my friend Antonio. I asked him, "If your consciousness was divisible, and you could reckon it as a percentage, how much of you is present at any given moment, and how much of you is somewhere else?" I told him that I didn't think I was ever more than ten or fifteen percent present, I was always mostly somewhere else.

I know a lot has been written about language, and how maybe it's arbitrary, but maybe it's adequate. I had a conversation along these lines. I told my friend that our insides are like a galaxy, billions of miles across. We can wander around inside ourselves without words, but to know each other, we have to have words. The words by which I know you, I told her, are like spaceships. Each one is headed in opposite directions in a huge galaxy, and they pass within sight of each other. At a window in each of the spaceships, there stands an astronaut. Each astronaut sees the other, and they wave at each other. Then they go on. That is what it is like to talk to someone. You are aware of all the other space in them, only because you know it in yourself. The Bible says, "Each heart knows its own bitterness, and no one can share its joy." Each person is familiar with his own galaxy, but the spaceships aren't enough.

This is the kind of thing I think about all day.

I don't know what a self is. I think it is mostly memories and experiences. I don't know if we are born with anything. Maybe there is total depravity and original sin; how else can we account for everyone inevitably becoming so bad? But I experience all this stuff, and then I remember it, and the remembering cannot help but be interpretive. It's like history. When Copernicus discovered that the Earth revolved around the sun, it wasn't epic. It was just a cool discovery. It is all the scientific discoveries since then that made it epic. The discovery didn't know that it was going to be a foundation for future experiments in astronomy. The discovery didn't know that it represented the decentralization of man in the cosmos. It just knew that it was a discovery. It was assigned meaning by all the stuff that came after it. When Jesus died, nobody (except maybe he himself) knew that God was reconciling the world to himself, was reconciling Jews to Gentiles, nobody knew that he was atoning for sins or absorbing God's wrath. What they saw was just a guy dying. It took a revelation to figure out the rest.

Your Friend to the Bitter End,
-zfa